Getting the buy-in from your clients is the most important, and most challenging, aspect of our job.
It can’t be faked or gamed for long, it has to come from the heart.
For some, it comes from a burning desire to help people. Whilst for others, it comes from a love of achievement for driving to be at the top of Ultimate Performance, getting a bonus or simple (and underestimated) professional pride.
You may like your client. You may adore your client. Or your client may be a royal pain in the ass who you cannot abide. It doesn’t matter – feelings are irrelevant. All that is a necessity is professional respect from you to the client, and the client back to you.
If you can achieve the appropriate level of respect, then you have won the game. Knowledge, programming, and protocols are all useful, they will make you much better at your craft. But they are secondary to the buy-in.
If you can achieve that, then you have won the game.
Some of you will have seen the image I shared recently from one of our clients in Amsterdam who tattooed her arm with the Ultimate Performance brand.
To me, this represented something more than slavish devotion to a logo, I don’t think it meant that at all. What we have given to this client is power and confidence.
We will have unlocked things inside herself – things that held her back and made her lose confidence in what she could achieve. By going through a physical transformation she has emerged as a mentally stronger and more resilient person.
Not only is this a touching thing for all of us to see, affirming why we work so tirelessly, but it is the ultimate example of buy-in.
The client trusts our brand, trusts her trainer, has ‘found’ herself during the process, and decided to permanently mark her body with a constant reminder of the power and achievement that is in her own hands.
Think about this – the level of responsibility that we have as trainers, if we do it right, is quite profound. Our work has meaning, and the more we grow as a business and as individuals within the broader company, the more we can effect positive change in those around us.
